


And those who were seen dancing

by Kafkaesque (Steviacookies)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Dysfunctional Relationships, Implied Self-Harm, M/M, Mild Gore, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-26
Updated: 2014-01-26
Packaged: 2018-01-10 03:47:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,940
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1154490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Steviacookies/pseuds/Kafkaesque
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will can see himself killing, but now he can see himself dying too, and it’s a blessing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And those who were seen dancing

 

 

 

When the skyline burns indigo with the dawn, when he washes his hands again and again counting the hours of insomnia and pills by the red veins in his eyes, when he wants to bleach his heart, foaming red and all the rotten blood, when he hears the whisper of a thousand lives interwoven with the wire of a fishing lure he’s making, and he cuts it, and he has to suppress shivers of pleasure—

-then he calls Doctor Lecter. He takes a Xanax and he calls him, and it’s not like calling a friend for help, and it’s not like calling Alana to ask _How are you_ aborting litanies of _I’m sorry I’m sorry I want to love you_ ; it’s like calling Garret Jacob Hobbs in the middle of the morning knowing already how Abigail’s neck will look spurting blood and her eyes too blue looking from the floor, it’s this murmuring of complicity about something so dreadful nobody else would understand, an oath of self-destruction.

 

 

 

Hannibal is there before Will can even regret it and gets him into his car and takes him to his house. It’s not that different from his study, actually; furniture of dark wood, canvases of French romantic painters, everything so tidy, clean, perfect; it looks like a study pretending to be a house to trick people into thinking Hannibal Lecter can ever stop being a psychiatrist and seeing your diseases ooze like oil from your forehead.

“Pure empathy, yet not pure enough,” says Hannibal, and like everything he says it wouldn’t have made any sense before leaving his mouth, but, lingering in the air like ozone smell, becomes exactly what Will never found words to say.

(Like _You liked killing him_ , like _You would do it again_. Like _But more slowly_.)

“You know only half of the story, after all,” says Hannibal, and pours a glass of red wine, closes his hand on the stem and swings it stylishly, never watches him in the eyes, says, “And you can’t find balance without knowing the other half- am I correct?”

“Of course,” Will snarls, and he’s rude, as rude as he can manage, because whenever he can’t swallow fear he throws it up, and Hannibal knows and smirks, his eyes the dark glowing colour of the best fishing lures.

“I can help you, Will.”

 

 

 

 

His hands are tied and his feet are tied and he can’t even _scream_ , a rag that tastes like dead skin and vomit on his tongue–

–and Hannibal is walking towards him, a kitchen knife in his hands and a quiet smile on his lips, and there’s absolutely nothing he can do about it, and every step is inevitable and everything becomes immensely clear, vivid, life drained and phantom blood trickling and every murderer who is God for an instant with a sharp scepter of steel.

“You are Cassie Boyle,” says Hannibal.

(Yes, Will is Cassie Bolye, yes, dead and cold and flesh torn by antlers wings, a statue of hollow meat, hears his own last breath still trapped in the lungs someone is chewing devotedly, like the twentieth Ave Maria of a rosary.)

 

 

 

Will can see himself killing, but now he can see himself dying too, and it’s a blessing.

 

 

 

“You are Marissa Shurr,” says Hannibal, and Will nods.

He lets Hannibal take his clothes off, lets him drug him and drag him to a room with red walls. Will feels guiltless, undefiled like a soul just born, and the bruises will be his baptism, and the blood his first communion. He remembers, long before, being the one who killed her, the one who opened her like a pig and slaughtered her, remembers feeling her flesh yield and her nails quiver toward his face, claws of an animal. Now he understands—

-it was only a ritual, only a role, deer antlers like a crucifixion. It takes an heap of the sacrificed, a staircase of corpses, blood stained altars, to even _think_ of extending one’s hands towards the divine. And when Hannibal carves the shadows of that glorious moment on his body, just a pale cord of blood where there should be a crown, just a shard of that agony, that open-mouthed dread, Will screams and cries like she cried, and deep down confesses on his knees that he wouldn’t mind be the last, empty eyed step.

 

 

 

When the skyline burns indigo with the dawn, Will has learnt to call Doctor Lecter, he calls him like he would call a murderer, says, “Now?”

“What are you asking me, Will?”

“Can you-?”

( _Can you kill me? Please_ , he never says, _Thank you_. He hopes his lack of etiquette will make the torture deeper)

Will can feel his smile on his skin like the caress of his knife.

“It can be arranged.”

 

 

 

“You are Nicholas Boyle.”  
Eviscerated, buried in the snow.

 

 

 

There is a new body and Jack calls him, as usual, _how new_.

“Can you do this, Will?” he says, and it’s all he needs not to feel guilty, even though he doesn’t let him answer.

It’s a skinned man, muscles and cartilage and articulations in sight, like a medieval miniature of anatomy tomes. Will closes his eyes and feels the sterile joy of the hand on the blade, because he's spent a long time thinking about this and how red it would be and how the blood would flow and how inhuman he would look at the end, a masterpiece, and feels the blade worming under skin and lifting skin—

-but this time the skin is his _own_ , and the wildfire bursting throughout nerve endings burns _his_ chest, and he wins and he loses, and he is the screams and the laughter and when he emerges panting he has never, not for one instant, forgotten his name. He’s brushing the stained murder weapon against his wrist.

Jack talks and talks and scolds him as if he were a child, tells him he ‘needs to work on his self-control’, and Will smiles, too large and too insane, on his dark shirt blood only looks like water, he lies, “It won’t happen again.”

(“Not in front of you, at least.”)

 

 

 

They find Il Boia (because the press loves to give psychopaths nicknames like they were pets, and Freddie Lounds wouldn’t know ‘tasteful’ even if one were to throw it right in her smug face) after two weeks and three more bodies and Will sighs, gets all the mayhem of the after-the-case to wash over him, and one evening he lets Hannibal skin him in the room with red walls.

This isn’t sanity, all the wounds that he doesn’t allow to heal, all the red sketches that Hannibal draws on his chest with his pencil sharpener, their language of scars and smiles and _it’s alright_ — it’s balance.

 

 

 

The Chesapeake Ripper is the worst, cruelest serial killer he has ever encountered in his career, and nevertheless he can’t get himself to hate him, to think about him as a monster, because Will, even though he would never admit it, always feels like the Ripper just _knew_ how he would like to be killed. The crimes scenes are presents, carefully boxed with a curled ribbon, suggestions _(you would like this, Will, you would like this death a lot)_ ; and murders and amputations look frighteningly like little gifts to brighten his days, like red wildflowers pressed between the pages of a book whenever he least expects them.

There is a woman: a neighbor finds her, strangled and exsanguinated and wearing an evening gown, shoeless. She didn’t suffer, she was drugged, Will sees it clearly through his eyelids, she died sleeping and dancing, clinging to her murderer. He feels the man’s body against his own, and feels a weird fullness, the warmth of not being alone, right before death, right before hands crushing his neck. It’s intimate, and at the same time detached. It wasn’t for this woman.

(Will accepts the present, he sweats ice and retches just once)

It’s the Chesapeake Ripper because after she died he tore her heart out-- that’s why he knows. He took her dancing and ate her heart.

 

 

 

Will’s hands are trembling, when he calls Hannibal. On entering the house that is not quite a house, Will takes his shoes off and he should suspect something then, really, weren’t he so blind and desperate, because Hannibal knows nothing about the case and yet doesn’t seem to need any explanation.

In the room with red walls, Hannibal surrounds him and leads him gently, warm against him. They follow a melody they both hear in their minds and Will’s heart throbs with an unknown rhythm, and he knows how Hannibal’s teeth would feel, ripping it apart.

Hannibal says everything Will can’t say, still dancing quotes with a vague smile in his tone, “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

Then he closes his hands around his neck, and presses.

 

 

 

It’s easy to hide his scars from Jack’s eyes.  
Will hears them like whispering secrets under his jacket, but Jack is too busy findings things that aren't there to start looking for things that are there- the scars whisper and Jack's not even listening.

 

 

 

The next time it’s a young man, still a child really, blue, vitreous eyes: he gutted him, left him empty, didn’t take anything away, though; the organs are still in a plastic bag, deposited on a digital scale. Will finds it hard to restrain himself from checking how much they weigh.

“ _I will carry your burdens_ ,” says Will, mockingly, and smirks, even though his facial muscles hurt. “Sounds like a love song to me. How romantic.”

Hannibal says nothing and his lips twitch, his eyes the vague red of open bodies and withered roses under the artificial light, and he lifts him and takes him to the room where he will kill him again.

 

 

 

(He doesn’t tell anyone how the crimes have become, without a doubt, personal, how the murders are executed just to be revived on his skin, just for Will’s sake. He doesn’t tell anyone because the truth is he doesn’t really mind. He has suspects but nothing he can’t forget with a knife on his lips. He’s never felt less alone.)

 

 

  

His birthday present is a drowned man. They find him in the river, bloated and bluish. On his chest, red and cruel and jagged, ‘MINE’’, he carved the letters so deeply he broke his ribs, he wrote it while he was still alive. Where there should be a colorless mouth, there’s an unsettling grin of a skull. He ate his lips. Will runs to Hannibal’s house and he’s out of breath, but he doesn’t even have to say a word.

Hannibal etches the letters on his skin with agonizing slowness, chisels them with a linoleum knife and retraces them with his nails. When he caresses softly his cheeks, he leaves thick, blood-red handprints. Will sighs and he will either break or become complete.

“Mine,” says Hannibal, and under layers and layers of his usual composedness Will hears a growl, something feral, something hungry. Then, everything falls into place. “ _Mine_ ,” he says again, savagely twisting the blade, and Will bares his teeth like an animal, because he understands now and there’s the horror and all the blood and how he could not see, he is so stupid, his stench of death, the monster lurking in the shadow—but it’s not a monster, is it, it’s _love_ , and Will sobs, “I know.”

 

 

 

“You are Will Graham,” says Hannibal, and his kiss is just teeth drawing blood.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Yup, Will's deeead. Or maybe not, you decide.
> 
> I know this is a bit weak and uninspired, but I feel like my English is finally moving to more solid grounds- like this time I half translated this and half wrote this, so. Still, I'd love you if you pointed out the mistakes that surely still lurk where I can't find them.


End file.
